BBC: The Genesis of Doctor Who

The BBC has compiled a set of documents showing how Doctor Who originally came to be as a BBC series. Explore the origins of this longest-running science fiction series in history. The BBC pieces together the story from the beginning with documents and images, starting with a report on the possibility of making science fiction for television and leading up to the moment a new drama series is announced in the pages of Radio Times.

Our favorite discover so far, reading the reports during the BBC’s consideration: In 1962, the follow-up report provides a list of a number of science fiction titles the report’s authors chose as potentially suitable for adaptation to television. The first criteria for inclusion:

1. They do not include Bug-Eyed Monsters.

2. The central characters are never Tin Robots.

The BBC site contains a whole lot more detail than we’ve included here, including full text of each of the reports and notes documents we’ve excerpted below. You could lose an afternoon reading through all the history provided.